1934 Deluxe Roadster is Better Than Original

Solid.

Mike Griffith’s ’34 Deluxe Roadster is remarkable in many ways. Its condition is remarkable: Most of the sheetmetal is original and rust-free, and those few parts that have been replaced are gennie Henry Ford steel, not repop. The car’s top is remarkable in that it’s original. Time-worn, certainly—it’s more than 80 years old, after all—but not ragged or torn at all.

That Mike bought the car, sight unseen, after a five-minute phone conversation is remarkable. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Maybe most remarkable of all is the fact that the roadster passed through three different car collectors between 1964 (the farthest back Mike can trace, to date, anyway) and when he bought it a year ago, and none of those gentlemen did much, if anything, with it. They all prized it and had plans to restore it, but for various reasons left it sit, largely untouched, for decades.

Not preservation, exactly. More like benign neglect.

All that changed when Mike bought it. When we first saw the car a year ago (and showed you pictures in the Sept. ’16 Roddin’ @ Random department), Mike told us his plan was to get the car running by hopping up the original flathead but to leave as much as he could as-is. “It’s only original once,” he told us then.

For the most part that still holds true. But when he put his head together with his buddy Rocky Webb to get the car on the road, they realized there were myriad details that needed attention, restoration—and in some cases modification—to fulfill Mike’s desire to drive the roadster. So while the body, top, and some of the running gear are still as they were when they rolled out of the Ford plant, Rocky and Mike have unapologetically hot rodded the car. “We’re doing it as if it’s 1950 and we’re 19 years old,” Rocky explains.

Previous Lives

Mike has been buying, selling, and collecting hot rods and speed parts for years. He’s one of those people who seems to know everyone in the hobby, and through those connections finds remarkable (there’s that word again) examples of historic and significant coupes, roadsters, gassers, customs, you name it. His parts collection borders on mythic; at one time he had gathered on the order of 100 Deuce grille shells. Mike is often our go-to guy if we need a vintage part—or an interesting location—for a photo shoot.

As is often the case with his purchases, Mike did extensive homework on this roadster and was able to trace its history back to 1964. That’s the year it was purchased by a collector in Fallbrook, California, who intended to subject it to a full, back-to-factory restoration. That never happened, though. It sat in his garage until a cancer diagnosis in 2000 prompted him to sell. The buyer was a man named Chris Carrier. “He was a collector of famous cars, cherry cars,” Mike says. “He bought Barris cars, bought Neal East’s car.” But, says Mike, “he had cancer himself.”

Carrier took the car to Connecticut, and it was most likely he who installed the replacement fenders, hood sides, and gas tank cover—all real Ford steel. “That’s a trademark of Carrier,” says Mike about the provenance of the parts. “It had to be right.”

Carrier passed away before he could do much else with the roadster. “His significant other put his cars up for sale, and a man named Jim Lowrey from New Hampshire bought six or seven of them, including this one,” Mike recounts.

Lowrey replaced the roadster’s original flathead with a ’34 21-stud engine out of a pickup that belonged to his father. Beyond that he left the car alone.

About two years ago Mike ran into another collector buddy, Dave Simard, at a Southern California swap meet. The two got to talking, the subject of Chris Carrier came up, and Simard told Mike about the ’34 roadster. Simard said the car was available, though he wasn’t interested. “I have 60 cars,” Simard told Mike. I don’t need another one.”

Intrigued, Mike got in touch with Lowrey. Or tried to. For three months. “Either his phone’s not working, or he’s not answering, or something,” Mike recalls. Finally Mike got Lowrey on the phone, and within five minutes the deal was done. “He’s straight up and knows his stuff,” Mike explains. “If Simard is high on it, and if Chris owned it, I know it’s good. I didn’t even ask for photos. I saw it for the first time when it rolled out of the trailer.”

Road Worthy

Rocky Webb is a contractor and industrial steel fabricator whose passion is hot rods. “My dad was born in 1932, and he had these kinds of cars when he was young, so I enjoy working on them,” he explains as we walk around his own Model A-based roadster. Turning to Mike’s oh-so-original car, he says, “I’d never be able to own one of these, but because of Mike I get to work on one.”

Rocky’s contributions to the car are more than we can list here, but among the highlights: When the two men realized the engine in the ’34 would need more work than our photo shoot schedule would allow, Rocky loaned Mike a ’39 Merc 99A flathead he had in his garage, and then hopped the motor up with an immaculate McCulloch supercharger. Rocky swapped the car’s original mechanical brakes for hydraulic binders (and found a trick way to plumb them with modern hardline that looks like brass), mounted a reverse-eye spring pack on a stretched and filled front axle that came from Mike’s parts stash, reworked the linkage for a set of ’39 pedals, and even built a new seat frame from scratch.

“It’s a good combination,” Rocky explains, “Mike’s knowledge of old-school hot rodding techniques and my fabrication abilities.” Rocky also wanted to give credit to several people who helped him get the roadster ready in a short time, including Mike Herman and the crew at H&H Flatheads; upholsterer Victor Lozano; Bill and Mike McGrath at the Early Ford Store, who “were really accommodating and even opened their place on a Sunday to let us get parts”; and Rocky’s friend Ray Covarrubias, who “spent a lot of nights with me helping me get this car together and tight.”

Rocky took the roadster on its initial shakedown run just a couple days before our photo session, to make sure we’d have no issues shooting car-to-car action. There are a couple small things to fix, he admits, like getting the hood to close over the tall Stromberg on top of the blower, and finding a set of shocks. But overall, he’s pleased.

Mike’s maiden voyage didn’t take place until we were there, cameras in hand.

“It’s a runner,” he tells us with a big grin after Wes gets his action shots. “It handled great at speed. Went down the road smooth and straight. No wobble. It’s tight, nothing’s loose. It’s solid.”

For more than 50 years, this ’34 Deluxe Roadster languished in the garages of several collectors, essentially untouched. It took the efforts of owner Mike Griffith and his friend Rocky Webb to get it back on the road again.The sheetmetal on Mike’s roadster has been on the car since it left the factory, save for the driver-side front and rear fenders, the gas tank cover, hood sides, and a small patch panel behind the driver’s door. “The original factory black paint is still on the body,” Mike says. “Our next step will be to slowly remove the thin coat of primer and polish out the original paint.”Like the body, the roadster’s top is original, and in excellent shape considering the fabric is more than 80 years old. “In all the years I’ve owned hot rods, I’ve never owned one with an original top,” Mike says.Rocky graciously loaned his ’39 Merc 99A flathead when the flattie in the roadster couldn’t be made worthy in time for our shoot. Starting with a bare block, Rocky had built the motor over the course of a year using “parts and good advice” from H&H Flatheads. Inside the motor are new pistons on the stock rods and crank (with N.O.S. Michigan bearings), an H&H blower cam, adjustable lifters, and small-block Chevy valves and keepers. The Red’s headers came from Mike’s parts stash.The Merc is bigger than the Ford engine, so they had to really shoehorn it into the roadster’s engine bay. With the motor pushed right up against the firewall, Rocky had to fab a new oil filler tube. He even had to bend the fan blades for extra clearance.Rocky bought the McCulloch supercharger from Mike Spacik at the L.A. Roadsters Father’s Day show swap meet. “It was the nicest, most complete McCulloch blower I’ve ever seen, so I bought it,” Rocky says. He figures it’ll push 4 to 5 psi “and should add 20 to 30 hp.”

The reverse-eye spring and stretched and filled front axle also came from Mike’s collection of hot rod parts. “It was probably dropped in the late ’40s or early ’50s,” he says. Bending the $2.50 eBay steering arm to accommodate the new axle “was a real thrash,” according to Rocky.Mike and Rocky left the rearend alone, with the exception of adding ’48 Ford juice brakes. “It’s amazing that the rearend hasn’t been rebuilt, the transmission hasn’t been rebuilt, and they work so well,” Mike says. “We did drain the goo out of the rearend and replaced it, but that’s it.”Those mufflers are so old they’re packed with steel, not fiberglass. They give the flathead a very mellow tone.The car came with a seat cushion and some upholstery that looked like it could have been original, but that was it. No seat back. Rocky fabbed a seat-back frame in wood and metal, restored the wire springs in the cushion, and found some material at Victor Lozano’s upholstery shop that looked a lot like the original seat covers. “Victor did the seat in a moment’s notice,” Rocky says. He and Mike plan to use more of the same material to finish the rumble seat.The steering wheel, column, shifter, and dashboard are all original. For now there are modern gauges in the panel to monitor the fresh flathead, but eventually Mike will put ’34 gauges in the holes. On the drawing board is an underdash panel, hooked to a piano spring, for temp, oil pressure, and amp gauges. “That way we can flip it down when driving and flip it up, out of sight, at shows,” Mike says.The 16-inch Kelsey Hayes wheels also came from Mike’s parts collection. While the rear tires are Coker Firestone repops, the fronts are vintage Olympic Air Ride tires Mike got from fellow SoCal rodder Robert Lomas.“A lot of people would mothball a car as nice as this,” Mike says. “But it’s meant to be driven.”